Thistle restructures

The debt-to-equity conversion plan to get Thistle Mining (THT-T) out of insolvency is complete, and a new board of directors, proposed in the restructuring plan, has been appointed.

The restructuring gives effective control to two secured debt holders, Meridian Capital and Waterford Finance & Investment, two privately held companies based in Britain. Each will hold 35% of the refinanced company’s shares through subsidiaries MC Resources and Casten Holdings.

Holders of Thistle’s debt notes will receive 11.5 million shares, representing a 25% interest in the company, and existing shareholders will be diluted to a 5% shareholding by a 1-for-200 consolidation.

The new board keeps its chairman, Lord Lang of Monkton, and takes on: Alexey Kruzhkov, the London-based executive director of Waterford; Askar Dostiyarov, a Kazakh businessman and executive director of Meridian; Barry Goldberg of Genuity Capital in Toronto; and lawyer Jeffery Barnes of Fraser Milner Casgrain.

The most prominent appointee to the board is Yury Shafranik, former Russian minister of fuel and energy and now chairman of Russian-Belarusian oil company Interstate Oil. Shafranik made several visits to Iraq to arrange Russian oil ventures in the country before the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003.

Thistle also gets South African management, in the person of Gerrit Maritz Kennedy, previously a vice-president at Gold Fields (GFI-N) subsidiary Kloof Gold Mines, who will assume the chief executive position. Another South African, Andreas Graetz, will take over as chief financial officer; Graetz was most recently at Placer Dome‘s (PDG-T) South Deeps operation.

Thistle’s founder, William McLucas, resigned “on mutually agreed terms” in December 2004. The company was suspended from trading on the TSX at year-end and sought protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act early in 2005 after defaulting on loans, originally advanced by Standard Bank, that had subsequently been sold to Meridian Capital.